Plastic pallet recycling in Phoenix: ZIPs, industries and the loads they leave behind

Phoenix in the numbers

Phoenix had 42,340 private warehousing and storage jobs in 2025, 2.23% of the national total and 5th of the 60 metros we cover.

It spans 2 counties: Maricopa and Pinal. Warehousing is 2.0% of private jobs there, and the metro holds 81.3% of Arizona's 52,054 warehousing jobs. 5 ZIP codes stand out for sites, led by 85043 (Phoenix, 61).

County by county

The largest warehousing counties in the metro: Maricopa (42,291) and Pinal (49).

• Maricopa County42,291 jobs, 99.9% of the metro's disclosed total.
• Pinal County49 jobs, 0.1% of the metro's disclosed total.

The industries behind the loads

2 industries are named for the Phoenix metro. The most concentrated is warehousing and storage, at 1.4 times the national share of employment.

• Warehousing and storage42,340 jobs in 2025, 2.23% of the US total. Check the strays first. Then separate the rackables, which are usually PP, from the nestables, which are usually HDPE. Describe each stack as its own line. Forklift tines split decks and chip corners. A racking change retires one style at once. Strays arrive on inbound trailers from shippers who use pooled pallets, and sit in the yard until someone asks whose they are. In a pile from here, photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side.
• Food manufacturing13,457 jobs in 2025, 0.76% of the US total. Hygienic 48 x 40 and 40 x 48 pallets in HDPE or PP, often with closed decks and colour-coding by zone. Some are listed as food safe but not approved for direct food contact. Sanitation audits remove cracked or stained pallets. A change of packaging line retires a colour-coded set. Pallets that held ingredients with strong odours or oils are culled early. In a pile from here, photograph the deck surface and any staining.

On the freight lanes: I-10

Phoenix sits on I-10, which runs from I-10 is the southernmost transcontinental Interstate, 2,460 miles long, the fourth-longest in the country. The metros we track on it hold 255,943 private warehousing jobs, 13.5% of the US total (disclosed counties only). Also on it: Los Angeles (27,225), Inland Empire (118,368), Houston (33,785), San Antonio (16,751), Jacksonville (15,384) and New Orleans (2,090).

Metros of a similar size

By warehousing jobs the nearest metros are Indianapolis (41,067), Northern New Jersey (39,367) and Philadelphia (38,250).

What the size of the market means

A market this size is made of many separate sites, so a pile in Phoenix is rarely the only one nearby. Large distribution clusters bring pooled pallets and mixed footprints into the same trailer, which is why the marks and the sizes get listed before anything else.

What a Phoenix load looks like

Warehousing and storage comes first here, at 42,340 jobs. Photograph the yard stacks, from the dock side and, for food manufacturing, the deck surface and any staining. Say the ZIP, the count and the footprint. Marks are checked before anything is ground.